🤷🏾♀️Takeaways: Why Are We Still Doing That? Positive Alternative to Problematic Teaching Practices
About the Authors
Pérsida Himmele is an associate professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She has served as an elementary and middle school teacher, a district administrator, an English language learner program consultant, and a public speaker on issues related to student engagement and teaching in diverse classrooms. She has lived, taught, and studied in New York, California, and Pennsylvania, becoming actively involved in advocating for the passage of educational policies and funding formulas for the betterment of urban schools and English language learners.
William Himmele is an associate professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. He has served as an ESL teacher and a speech pathologist, a higher education administrator, an international consultant, and a speaker on issues related to increasing student engagement and teaching English language learners. Himmele also served as the coordinator for the graduate ESL teacher certification program at Millersville University and has been an educational program consultant for several schools in various countries seeking to improve their school programs. He is coauthor with Pérsida Himmele **of Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner and Total Literacy Techniques: Tools to Help Students Analyze Literature and Informational Texts.
Table of Contents
⭐ The Book in 3 Sentences
🎨 Impressions
🤔 Who Should Read It?
💡 How the Book Changed Me
✍🏾 My Top 3 Quotes
📘 Summary + Notes
⭐ The Book in 3 Sentences
From instruction and assessment to classroom and behavior management, many of the practices we implement within our 21st century schools are counterintuitive and problematic.
This book affords readers with practical, low-lifting strategies for increasing student engagement, building positive classroom communities, and developing more effective formative assessment practices.
Instructional practices must evolve alongside the needs of an ever-changing society.
🎨 Impressions
From cover to cover, this book is less than 150 pages in length. Within each chapter, Himmele and Himmele afford a brief, historical context and a research-practitioner connection to the presented problematic teaching practices and follow up with three or more optimistic alternatives for teachers to consider. Having read several books of this nature, what stands out about this particular source is the tone of the authors. As a reader, I felt as though I were having a consoling conversation with the authors where they identified the major issues within the field that I’ve been an unknowing proponent of, but extended a level of grace and sympathy within that identification. Rather than taking an accusatory and haughty stance, Himmele and Himmele openly admit to the times they’ve fallen short, learned from their mistakes, and share out their ideas in a way that makes me feel as though any reader can easily do the same. This impression is deeply supported by the manner in which the two educators close out the book with an emphasis on the importance of “grace” and “togetherness.”
🤔 Who Should Read It?
As indicated by the authors, this book was intended for “K-12 teachers at all stages of their career, including preservice teachers.” However, I would also recommend several chapters to instructional coaches, mentors, and other teacher development leaders for them to read, assign, and discuss with their teachers and mentees while working on building capacity in restorative justice and classroom management practices.
💡 How the Book Changed Me
How my life / behaviors / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book
I have learned to become more skeptical of teaching practices, particularly those that have remained unchanged since the era of my own compulsory education experiences. In reflection, although many of the practices used by my teachers might’ve produced compliance within me through fear and shame, the damaging effects of self-efficacy and anxiety continue to haunt me to this day. As an instructional leader, it is important for me to be cognizant of the barriers I have experienced within my own journey of learning growth and do what I can to redeem the mistakes of decades past by being and supporting the changes needed for K-12 instruction.
✍🏾 My Top 3 Quotes
“Too often, we think of literacy as being composed of discrete skills that can be taught and assessed at specific points in time and in isolation one from the other. But assessing these skills in isolation doesn’t tell us whether a child can or cannot apply them as a reader, writer, or learner” (p. 76).
On the danger of rigid pacing guides: “While pacing guides can serve as helpful road maps, if they are too rigid, they can eat away at teacher discretion and keep them from structuring their classes in ways that work for their students…Guardrails can be helpful, but nobody appreciates or is helped by a backseat driver. Likewise, when the pacing guide stops feeling like a guide and starts feeling like handcuffs, it has gone too far…When it causes us to ignore the needs of our English learners, our learners experiencing trauma, our students with special needs, and our most vulnerable students, it is time to draw the line. The pacing guide has gone too far” (p. 82).
“…behavior charts reinforce damaging beliefs, serving as a poster-sized reminder of who the ‘good kids’ are and who the ‘bad kids’ are. Withholding recess only exacerbates your current problem of not allowing the students who need it the most an opportunity to release pent up energy; what’s more, it denies them the chance to practice badly needed social skills within actual social settings” (p. 102).
